John Updike famous quotes

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
-- John Updike

#Inspiration #Literature #Materials

What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.
-- John Updike

#Believe #Book #What Matters

Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
-- John Updike

#Acceptance #Self #Solitude

Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That's a nice quality if you can do it in fiction.
-- John Updike

#Nice #Moving #Writing

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.
-- John Updike

#Life #Experience #Doe

The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.
-- John Updike

#Emotional #Agreement #Stories

There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
-- John Updike

#Quality #Way #Firsts

If you look at the best-seller list, it is mostly thrillers. Very few books attempt to create an image of the life we live. I knew there were writers who wore tweed coats and lived in Connecticut and somehow made a living, and that's what I aimed to do. I've tried to write as well as I can with books that say something to any reader.
-- John Updike

#Book #Writing #Looks

Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
-- John Updike

#Love #Fashion #Mirrors

The educational aspect of art shows has become overbearing: some of exhibits can leave you bleary from trying to read the walls. Presumably a piece of art is timeless and it can say something to us. You are taking away the right of art to talk for itself.
-- John Updike

#Art #Wall #Educational

When you look into a mirror it is not yourself you see, but a kind of apish error posed in fearful symmetry kool uoy nehW rorrim a otni ton si ti ˛ees uoy flesruoy dnik a tub rorre hsipa fo lufraef ni desop yrtemmys
-- John Updike

#Errors #Mirrors #Perspective

I'm not against TV; I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go.
-- John Updike

#Morning #Goes On #Might

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
-- John Updike

#Sex #Too Much #Enough

So, you know, I think any life has in it enough material, enough points of departure, to fuel a writer's career and that we shouldn't worry about what we're not but to try to focus on what we are and what we do know.
-- John Updike

#Thinking #Careers #Worry

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
-- John Updike

#Pain #Writing #Able

I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size.
-- John Updike

#Book #Hands #Numbers

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.
-- John Updike

#Fun #People #Dumb

I think it's the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things happen one after the other, that makes a book interesting to read page to page
-- John Updike

#Book #Thinking #Interesting

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.
-- John Updike

#Book #Writing #Jam

You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.
-- John Updike

#Book #Design #Trying

If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.
-- John Updike

#Being Yourself #People #Pay

There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving...
-- John Updike

#Race #Car #Chance

The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.
-- John Updike

#Air #Blue #Voice

To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.
-- John Updike

#Dream #Reality #Men

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
-- John Updike

#Positive #Success #Dream

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.
-- John Updike

#Life #Faces #Mask

Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me; I don't know how they do it.
-- John Updike

#People #Musician #Mysterious

Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
-- John Updike

#Life #Rain #Sky

The - writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I say, intercourse with humanity might well be an aggressive writer.
-- John Updike

#Writing #Humanity #May

Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.
-- John Updike

#Writing #Rewriting #Constant

Seemed to me important in writing about people to be able to describe the sexual transactions between them. It's - for many people it's the height of, what they see, of ecstasy and poetry is in their sexual encounters. And furthermore, personality - human personality does not end in the bedroom, but persists.
-- John Updike

#Writing #People #Personality

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
-- John Updike

#Inspirational #Patience #Years

I think people do look to writers to tell the truth in a way that nobody else quite will, not politicians or ministers or sociologists. A writer's job, is to, by way of fiction, somehow describe the way we live. And to me, this seems an important task, very worth doing, and I think also, to the reading public, it seems, even though they might not articulate it, it seems to them something worth doing also.
-- John Updike

#Jobs #Reading #Thinking

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
-- John Updike

#Self #Essentials #Literature

I write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go. I am kind of stuck in the middle as far as my life goes, and hence my imagination tends to zero in on things which are indeed in the middle. That is, I don't write about the very rich, who I scarcely know, or the very poor who I don't know very well either.
-- John Updike

#Zero #Writing #Thinking

A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
-- John Updike

#Leadership #Men #People

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
-- John Updike

#New York #Believe #People

Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?
-- John Updike

#Yesterday #Each Day #Afraid Of Death

Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
-- John Updike

#Baby #Art #Shoes

Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.
-- John Updike

#Book #Kissing #Average

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
-- John Updike

#Marriage #Teacher #Aristocracy

I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
-- John Updike

#Life Is Too Short #Reading #Writing

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.
-- John Updike

#Literature #Lasts #Moments

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
-- John Updike

#Motivational #Inspiring #Education

Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
-- John Updike

#Education #Learning #Years

The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.
-- John Updike

#Trying #Medusa #Steps

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
-- John Updike

#Beauty #Naked #Revolutionary

There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
-- John Updike

#Neglected

Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.
-- John Updike

#Life #Yummy #Long

I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.
-- John Updike

#Years #Poetry #Four

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
-- John Updike

#Inspirational #Truth #America

Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier ages: Let us walk through the door.
-- John Updike

#Doors #Age #Events

There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
-- John Updike

#Patience #Tunnels #Doubt

It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.
-- John Updike

#Lying #Firsts #Deceit

The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things.
-- John Updike

#Golf #Swings #Trying

School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
-- John Updike

#Education #School #Parent

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.
-- John Updike

#Memories #Lenses

You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
-- John Updike

#Clue

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
-- John Updike

#Zoos #Children #Mirrors

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
-- John Updike

#Artist #Risk #Excess

Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.
-- John Updike

#Wickedness #Guts

We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.
-- John Updike

#Kings #Hero #Writing

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
-- John Updike

#Space #Religion #Stories

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
-- John Updike

#Success #Writing #Decay

We are most alive when we're in love.
-- John Updike

#Love #Marriage #Alive

Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more.
-- John Updike

#Doe #Needs #Looks

There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.
-- John Updike

#Basketball #Baseball #Country

The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.
-- John Updike

#Artist #Doe #World

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
-- John Updike

#Appreciation #Teacher #Art

Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.
-- John Updike

#Children #Dirty #Golf

Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
-- John Updike

#Memories #Joy #Tears